Foundation for Defense of Democracies

FEBRUARY 2011

• The United Nations is a hotbed for corruption and abuse.  It is opaque, diplomatically immune, largely unaccountable – and has come to regard billions in U.S. tax dollars not as a privilege to be earned, but as an entitlement.
• The UN does not issue clear reports to donor nations on how their money is spent. That includes the United States, the U.N.’s biggest donor, which bankrolls roughly 25% of the U.N.’s soaring system-wide spending. In 2009, U.S. taxpayers contributed more than $6.3 billion to an incoherent U.N. system-wide budget, which by some estimates now totals more than $25 billion per year. 
• In the 192-member U.N. General Assembly, which shapes the core budget and works on a system of one country-one vote, the U.S., is often marginalized or out-voted, despite contributing more than two-thirds of the least-assessed U.N. member states combined. Decisions tend to be dominated by substantially nondemocratic voting blocs, such as the 56 member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (headquartered in Saudi Arabia).
• In recent years, the U.S. has done little to demand accountability. Since 2008, the U.S. State Department post of envoy in New York for U.N. Management and Reform has been left to an acting ambassador. The current nominee has no evident expertise on the labyrinthine U.N. system.
• Beyond wasting U.S. taxpayer dollars, the U.N. in some cases uses U.S. money to actively undermine American values and interests. For instance: Procurement of dual-use items for North Korea by the UN’s flagship agency, the U.N. Development Program (UNDP), as emerged in the 2007-2008 Cash-for-Kim scandal; or the U.N. offering itself as a platform for gags on free speech, and for such anti-American anti-Semitic exercises as the 2009 Durban II conference in Geneva (starring Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a main speaker), and U.N. plans to host a Durban III conference this coming September in New York.
• Among many other examples of U.N. abuses: The Human Rights Council, even after a major 2006 “reform,” welcomed Libya last year to a 47-seat membership that also includes such human rights abusers as China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Cuba, and continues to condemn democratic Israel more than any other state.
• UNRWA, the U.N.’s Palestinian Refugee Agency, to which the U.S. is the biggest donor, was created in 1949 as a temporary outfit, but more than 60 years later has become an entrenched welfare system, its client rolls swollen five-fold to more than 4.7 million recipients, impeding peace and fostering terror in the Middle East. Headquartered in terrorist-controlled Gaza, UNRWA is now planning to open a representative office in Washington, in effect using U.S. tax dollars to help promote UNRWA’s interests to Congress and the administration.
• The U.N. has failed to reform. Following the Oil-for-Food scandal, in which the U.N. profited from and covered up for billions in Baghdad kickbacks and corruption, the U.N. in 2006 promised greater transparency, accountability, an end to Peacekeeper rape, the elimination of redundant mandates, and a more ethical culture. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon arrived in office in 2007 promising “to restore trust” and calling for a system-wide audit. None of these things has been accomplished.
• Inside the U.N., a special anti-corruption task force set up in 2006 was dissolved at the end of 2008. The U.N.’s internal audit division, the Office of Internal Oversight Services, has been roiled with scandal and frictions, operating for years with only an acting director of its investigations unit, and roughly 25% of its posts empty.  A former chief of the unit has accused the Secretary-General of “deplorable” actions to impede her hiring of investigators, and charged that “the secretariat is now in a process of decay.”
• Americans are under-represented among UN staff. Meanwhile, Iran is over-represented on U.N. governing bodies.  Iran now sits on the governing boards of more than half a dozen major U.N. agencies and organizations, including UNICEF, the World Food Program, and the U.N.’s flagship agency, the U.N. Development Program (UNDP).
• Among UN member states, the only serious oversight comes from the U.S., the great majority of the other 192 member states being effectively free riders on U.S. credibility and funding. The only real levers for reform have been withholding of money and exposure of abuses.